


And still she said, I will find you, I will find you

by Thistlerose



Category: The White Queen (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Ghosts, Post-Canon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:26:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne Neville can't lie still in her grave.  So she goes to find Richard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And still she said, I will find you, I will find you

Anne Neville died at twenty-eight and was buried with modest ceremony in Westminster Abbey. As the Kingmaker’s daughter, not to mention Queen Consort of England, perhaps she’d deserved more pomp, more spectacle, if not from her people, then from her purportedly grieving husband. Though she supposed it wasn’t every royal lady whose death was marked by an eclipse of the sun. In any case, it didn’t occur to her to object; Anne had died with many regrets, but as the noonday sky had dimmed, she’d felt over. Finished.

But, to her surprise, she discovered after a time that she could not lie quietly in her grave; the grief and guilt that had made living so painful and caused her to look toward death with relief, now made her restless. And she had things to say to her dear husband.

So she rose and went off to find him.

But time had passed more quickly than she’d realized, lying in her grave, and she found the land greatly changed. Castles had crumbled or been torn down, replaced by edifices that seemed strange to her. The fashions had changed too, and the language; when people talked, she missed every third word. Everything was faster, brighter, louder.

She felt like a single dry leaf, caught up in a storm. The world wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to focus on any one piece of it, and if she tried she knew that she’d go mad. So she concentrated on what she remembered: the slope of a hill, the meandering course of a stream. Her husband’s face.

He was out there somewhere in this teeming, glistening world.

Lost.

Waiting.

Richard.

She knew about Bosworth. She’d felt him die. Lying in her grave in Westminster, she’d felt every blow as it cut through armor, flesh, and bone. All that was left of her, every atom that still remembered being _Anne Neville_ , had writhed. And she had wanted to go to him, to be with him, to comfort him as she’d failed to when their son had died.

But she couldn’t. Not then.

Because it was her fault. All of it.

The boys’ deaths.

(Brackenbury had lied when he’d absolved her. He’d done it out of kindness – perhaps even love – to a dying woman, but he had lied. She’d known it then, in her heart, as she knew it now.)

Her own dear boy’s death.

(The old, bad queen had known what she’d done, somehow, and punished her for it. She’d sent a curse to kill Anne’s sweet, innocent Edward. But it was still Anne’s fault. Anne had known it. Even as she accused Richard, she’d known it.)

Richard’s growing attraction to his niece. To his own _niece_ , when he’d promised to be a good and true husband to Anne, when he’d promised to love her. And that was her fault too. If she hadn’t been so jealous, if she hadn’t belittled Elizabeth at every opportunity, prompting Richard to defend her.

All her fault.

She hadn’t been able to face it then.

She wasn’t sure what had changed during the years she’d lain quietly in Westminster, only that something had. So she was going to find Richard, and tell him

_I’m sorry_

_I’m sorry_

And ask him one question.

There was only one real difficulty: she didn’t know where he was. She knew roughly where he’d fallen, but not where he’d been laid to rest. For all she knew, Henry Tudor had had his body chopped into pieces and scattered across England. Not that where he lay really mattered, if his spirit was as restless as hers was; but it was a place to start.

Since she didn’t know where he was, she went everywhere, over the length and breadth of England. Sometimes she followed the roads; other times, she let the wind take her. Wherever she stopped, she looked at all the faces of both the living and the dead, sifting for the only one she cared about. 

The land changed as she moved from place to place, often without her even noticing. She had no sense of time. Sometimes, when she stopped and looked back, she was mildly surprised to discover that a city had sprung up, when she couldn't remember passing through one. In the blink of an eye, scattered acorns went from saplings to tall oaks to hollowed out, moldering stumps, where small animals made their dens. People were born, died, and were buried, and the ivy grew up over their graves, and the wind and the rain scoured away their names.

And in all her wanderings, she did not see Richard. She heard his name sometimes; he was in the history books and someone, at some point, had written a play about him. She even heard her name, from time to time. She didn’t pay much attention, though sometimes she wondered what was said of her, if people blamed her for the princes’ deaths, or if they blamed Richard

(as she had done, though she'd known the truth)

And she wondered if perhaps Richard didn't want to be found.

But she told herself, _I don't care. I am your wife, your queen. And I don't care what people think._

_I will find you._

_I will find you._

Sometimes she wondered if she would recognize him after all this time. She’d died before him; perhaps, in the months between her death and his, he’d changed greatly.

She heard talk of a withered arm and a hunched back. 

_Bottled spider._

_Bunch-backed toad._

His shoulders had been rounded and slightly crooked, she remembered. But what if she remembered wrong?

Dark eyes, deep-set in an almost preternaturally pale face. (Had he really been that pale? Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure.)

Unruly dark hair. A soft, solemn mouth. A strange smile that flashed only on rare occasions, and tended to make him look more surprised than happy. Not the handsomest of the three sons of York, but his had been the face she’d loved.

What if she remembered wrong?

She would find him anyway.

If it took a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, she would find him, and she would know him. Out of all the faces in all the world and in all time.

And when she found him, she would confess everything: all her sins and regrets. And if he didn’t recoil from her, she would ask him, _Did you really love Elizabeth?_

This time, she would know the truth when she heard it.

And if he said yes, she would go quietly back to her grave and lie there until the Day of Judgment. But if he said _No, it was you I loved, only you,_ and looked at her the way he had on that long ago night, when she asked him to meet her in the garden—

When the air was so cold that their laughter froze, and the snow came down softly all around them, like a curtain—

Then she would stand with him, so close that if they were alive they’d appear as one, and wait amid the shattered kingdoms of the world until shafts of sunlight pierced them and they dissolved together.

9/9/2013

**Author's Note:**

> People asked, so I wrote a sequel: [Let Me Sit Heavy On Thy Soul](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1140658)


End file.
